Web 3.0 has been canceled for lack of linearity
I’ve given a few interviews in Milan where I’ve been for the past two days — what a beautiful city! — and almost every time, someone has asked what Web 3.0 will be. As if I’d know!
If Web 2.0 is about how easy it’s become for people to participate, how easy it has become to mash together disparate applications, and how the “network effect” brings about emergent results, then Web 2.0 is all about making the Net radically unpredictable.
So, the only answer to the question “What will Web 3.0 be?” has to be not only that we don’t know, but that we can’t know.
Web 2.0 also makes it less likely that a single change will sweep the entire Net, for Web 2.0 makes it easier to diversify the Web’s offerings. So Web 2.0 may also spell the end of giving the Web point revision numbers.
In short, if there is a Web 3.0, then Web 2.0 didn’t do its job.
Categories: web 2.0
web 2.0 + web 1.0 = web 3.0
no ?
Or will Web 3.0 be a pedulum swing away from the unpredictable, a kind of settling down of the environment? Can any environment be tumultuous ad infinitum? Or will the Web will settle upon a generally agreed-upon level of structure and organization?
We certainly can’t “know,” but we can guess, cant’ we?
Web Free is the web that finally sheds itself of the shackles that attach to the metaphors it inherited from the print media world.
The major shackle is copyright – the idea that reproduction and distribution must be monopolised for the benefit of publishers.
The minor shackle is the idea that art must be encumbered by advertising, that audiences are there for artists and/or their publishers to exploit.
The Internet, the Web, is an instantaneous diffusion device. It offers far more efficient and accurate communications.
Shackling its use in order to sell liberty is backward. Broadcasting annoying messages to all in order to reach a few is counter-productive.
So, neutralise your copyright (it’ll be abolished eventually anyway) and cleanse your publications of pollution (3rd party advertisements). Communicate and deal with your audience as customers, directly. Give up the barbaric practices of manacling their hands and selling their eyeballs.
I suspect that as the years roll on, we will see repeating patterns of activities, structure and results develop. The use of the Web involves its technical “architecture” combined with the constraints (if that’s what we can call it) of purposeful human behaviour.
That messy human behaviour … there’s a reason why we are supposed to learn from history, even when it did not involve using the Web. I’ve often wondered if looking backwards from (say) 100 or 200 years from now whether human activities in interlinked digital networks, made visual, will somehow resemble fractals.
I am seeing the real challenge of web 2.0 is determining the meaning or implications of the content provided through social media. I think web 3.0 will be an attempt to coalesce around an understanding of the new social relations implied by social media (or if in fact they are even new) and an attempt to coalesce around the meaning of content created by social media. My guess is that some of the impetus around this coalescence will be progressive, but that there will also be a regressive push to brand and control social media by creating more gated social media products to impose meaning staking out a claim of coherence as a value proposition.
[...] Weinberger, author of the excellent Everything is Miscellaneous, says he is often asked what web 3.0 will [...]
I get asked this from time to time in higher ed. Not very often, actually.
So I usually mention that there are a few different ideas:
-semantic Web, for collections one owns
-programmable Web, running on content others have semantically marked up
-mobile Web
-social-graph-centered web
…and that one Gartner analyst’s joke, that it should be called Web 2.1.
When I heard someone ask you that question, I cringed inside. I feel it’s often a way for the asker to show others they really don’t understand the Internet to begin with…especially when looking for a concrete answer from just one person!
It was great to meet you. I hope you continue to wear your collector’s “pin” and it will become even more valuable after November 4th.
I’m so proud this post was written wihile you were guest in our offices :)